TEDMED 2009 – Day 1

A bladder grown at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine

Yesterday we settled into our hotel room in San Diego, grabbed a burger, and went straight to session one of TEDMED. The first set of speakers consisted of a beat poet and performance artist Sekou Andrews, synthetic geneticist Craig Venter, regenerative medicine gurus Daniel Kraft, Anthony Atala, and Damien Bates, magician Eric Mead, ER and Law and Order SVU writer Neal Baer, geographic medicine popularizer Bill Davenhall, and songwriter Jill Sobule.
Sekou Andrews kicked off the conference with an energetic, free-flowing poem of sorts about health care, rhyming a mash-up of medical terms and concepts to get the crowd excited for the conference at hand.
After him, Craig Venter took the stage and chatted about synthetic biology and how his team synthesized the entire bacterium of Mycoplasma genitalium from four bottles of nucleotides (for a good overview of synthetic biology, take a look at this New Yorker piece). The main idea that kept emerging in his talk is that the DNA of a life form is analogous to the software and then all of the hardware is sculpted upon its code. It intuitively made sense, but the team was surprised when they actually were able to transplant the DNA of one bacterium into another, which lead the recipient organism to undergo physiologic metamorphosis.
Next we heard from a series of speakers involved with regenerative medicine. Daniel Kraft (flashback: MarrowMiner) spoke of the role of stem cells in medicine and how he discovered a better way to harvest them from the pelvis. Damien Bates, the chief medical officer of Organogenesis, the company behind biologic wound healing film Apligraf, passed around a sample of their wound healing tissue for people to feel as well as talked about how the skin heals and how it can be aided by regenerative biology.
Anthony Atala, from the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, talked about the various methods his research center is using to grow specific tissues and organs. He described much of the tissue creation process as sort of building the layers of a cake, with each tissue type placed one on top of the other. For linearly organized organs, such as arteries, this isn’t so much of a problem, because you can just grow layers upon layers of tissues. However, for the more complicated, highly solid organs with lots of blood vessels, this methodology breaks down, and the scientists have to either use some sort of pre-made matrix or need to harvest tissues from other sources and de-cellularize them, leaving behind only the collagen scaffold that can be populated by cells.
To wrap up the hard science part of things, Bill Davenhall talked about the importance of adding more environmental data to patients’ charts, under the hypothesis that living in some environments predisposes a person to certain diseases, and this sort of geo-medicine data might be useful to practicing clinicians.
Lastly, Neal Bear, writer and producer of ER and Law and Order SVU, discussed story telling in medicine, and Jill Sobule sang a lighthearted song about the apocalypse (surprisingly not as depressing as it sounds).
That’s all for today. Note that all of these talks will be later made available online for free at TEDMED.com.

Sean is the Co-Founder and CEO of Omada Health, (http://omadahealth.com), a Silicon Valley startup that aims brings thoughtful and engaging products to disease prevention and health promotion. Prior to Omada Health, Sean was enrolled in Harvard’s joint MD/MBA program, and previously worked in IDEO’s Health & Wellness group driving innovative work for providers, health technology companies, and employers. Sean also spent two years at Google, served as an editor at Medgadget.com, and was recently named as one of the "40 Under 40" top medtech innovators by MDDI. He received his BS from Columbia University.